Saturday, February 17, 2007

TorStar on CPC Sleaze

Oh yeah! Today's editorial in the Toronto star pretty much sums up what Liberals knew all along about the values and moral fibre of Canada's 'New Government'. Words like gutter and sleaze come up, but hey, if the shoe fits...

'While Harper took office promising "good, clean government," there is nothing good or clean about lashing out from the gutter to claw down the opposition even before the election writ is dropped.Exactly what Canadian "values" are engaged by a French-language TV ad the Tories aired this week that links Dion to the highly-charged term "vendu," which means "sellout" or "traitor," a jab at his credentials as a staunch Quebec federalist? Or in another that slyly implies Dion and Jean Chrétien are criminals, picturing them behind yellow police tape labelled "centralization, pollution, sponsorships and fiscal imbalance"?What value inspires an English-language ad, aired earlier this month, that links Dion to the sponsorship scandal, among other things, when the entire country knows he had no part in that particular fiasco?Or one that links former Liberal finance minister Ralph Goodale to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police income-trust probe that hurt the Liberals in the last election? The RCMP cleared Goodale and his aides this week. Even so, a Tory spokesman insisted "the ads will continue to run." That speaks volumes about values in Harper's camp.While some of the ads are amusing, they are also personal, vicious and misleading. They invite the public to look beyond Harper's soothing rhetoric, to the shabbier reality of his politics. There is a growing dissonance between what he says and what he does.'